It’s rare that a game will hit me as hard from both ends of the playing field as Yankai Peak’s Kenny Sun’s newest game Ball x Pit has. Playing as a crazy combination of Breakout, Arkanoid, and a whole bunch of roguelite/roguelike, base building, and auto-shooter staples, with a touch of bullet hell just to round things out, Ball x Pit’s driven me me to pure unadulterated rage and at the same time filled me with joy during the handful of hours that I’ve played it so far. There’s even some Vampire Survivors thrown in if you turn on autoshoot!
The concept is far from simple, but it starts out that way: your kingdom has basically fallen through a seemingly infinite pit, and now you are tasked with slowly building an elevator/town of sorts in order to get to the bottom of things, quite literally. You do that by juggling two distinct gameplay modes, one where you play a vertical auto-scroller, bouncing power balls up and ricochetting them on walls in order to destroy waves of enemies before you reach a boss, while in the other, you work on building out and maintaining your base.
Progression is where the real meat of Ball x Pit is, since the further you get in both sides of the game, the more resources you’ll have to keep evolving both your characters and the production side of your HQ. The more shooting that you do, the more schematics you’ll find to build, more friends you’ll reach that’ll join the fight, and, most importantly, the deeper you’ll start getting as you get stronger and are able to kill bosses. Funnily enough, bouncing goes into base-building as well, since you’ll be doing it in order to collect from your many farms and forests, same with constructions, requiring some smart planning in regards grid placement from your part in order to reap the most benefits between runs.
The thing is, Ball x Pit can be pretty dang difficult during its action bits, mostly because enemies are unrelenting, and you can easily get your projectiles stuck as they bounce and ricochet repeatedly in their back ranks if you’re not careful. Since these only shoot from your character again when they get back to you, you’re essentially forced to, while playing and trying to dodge attacks, calculate their trajectory, whether they’ll get trapped, if that is to your advantage, all the while the enemy never stops coming. Upgrades stack, but the real magic comes in when combining powers into much stronger abilities, and given there are so many, the amount of permutations for customizing a run are just plain ridiculous.
So it’s good that there’s the option to slow it all down, or make it faster if you feel confident, which helps give you a little breathing room – but not too much, mind – in order to be able to think about your next move. And like any good game, you’ll get better the more you play Ball x Pit, and your army of toons also get permanent stat increases throughout your time playing, so even in failure, which you’ll see plenty of, believe me, there’s reward. Plus, levels go by so quickly that losing and restarting is just a matter of trying again at the cost of ten mere minutes, tops.
Presentation-wise, Ball x Pit is very unique. It’s a mix of retro pixel art with some simple polygonal graphics, resulting in a game that looks like it’d be at home on the Saturn of all places. The only slight I have against it is in the sound department, as effects can be a little too similar, and the music, very repetitive, all noticeable when replaying sections again in order to gather the required materials to progress to later stages or simply farming for base upgrades.
Other than the sometimes uneven difficulty provided by the breakneck speed of the game, Ball x Pit is an excellent release by the always wise curation of publisher Devolver Digital. I’m positively struck by how addicting it is even though it pisses me off in equal measure. As with Kenny Sun’s previous creations, it’s something that’s worth keeping on the backburner and burning a few minutes on every so often, which is what I’ll be doing most definitely in the coming months.
